Bruce, If this were a discussion about taxes -- some sovereign authority to levy tax -- but it isn't -- taxation and authority to tax are simply analogs to fees and contracts. Tax structures serve a variety of policy goals -- my wife has become a tax maven over the past year preparing to run for a seat in the Maine legislature -- we've a Jarvis-Gann "property tax cap" on a ballot, a wild disparity of means between the wealthy summer-people and the year-rounders, and and the Maine woods are rife with strutting turkeys of any number of stripe gobbling out "fairness and equity" arguments. Oblig promotional: Please point the browser of your choice, and mozilla is always a good choice, at http://www.williams4me.org and stuff up to $250 into the PayPal box. US law prohibits campaign contributions by evil foreigners (e.g., Canadians, etc.) only in _national_ elections, not state, so evil foreign and good domestic registrars please throw money. This blatant grab at fat checkbooks is not limited to Bruce's. Mainers ("Mainiacs" is the prefered form) need to find out what their shared policy goals are, within the bounds of municipal, state, and federal taxes and services -- one instance of the American political idiom. Presumably a balance can be found that is better than raw police power. Some agreement about the nature of government, etc. Our problem(s) is/are different. Is the original policy, some form of economic diversity (e.g., "competitive registrars") still controlling in ICANNv2.0? Do we have a shared interest? Is it just surviving the dotBOMB market collapse? Is it "good government"? (would the "goo goos" in the RC kindly hold up their hands.) Is it expanding the dns market? Is it expanding the derived market? Is it being ahead of the telcos in franchise-space when e164.arpa goes live? (Sorry about that BT, DT, and AOL.) We know there is insufficient shared interest by the registries to support a single protocol/version/toolkit model. That was tried and it failed. We registrars may be just as incapable of finding a shared interest that can shape our fees and services dialog with ourselves and the rest of the bits that make up the ICANN constituencies and institutional secretariate. Nothing is perfect, including this note. Eric